The board of ICANN has voted to allow non-Latin characters in web addresses. For many web surfers, this is a great leap forward in accessibility.

This change only affects domain names — anything that comes after the dot, such as .com, .cn or .jp. Until now, they could only be in 37 characters — 26 Latin letters, 10 digits or a dash. But starting next year, domain names can be the characters of any language.

And:

This is a boon especially for users who find it cumbersome to type in Latin characters to access Web pages. Of the 1.6 billion Internet users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not based on the Latin alphabet.